Eating a single simple hamburger, sounds easy right? Well, at least in theory. But sometimes it is not quite that easy. The nightmares are slowly fading away, and I can share my experiences with one devil spawn of a burger.

The day started as a pretty good day. A friend was returning from a vacation, and made a trip with my wife to welcome him back. I called him on the way, and challenged him to eat a hamburger. Unfortunately he had too many excuses, but agreed to eat something else, while I feasted on the burger from depths of hell.

So we went to the restaurant, and I hesitantly placed the order of one "Death Burger," and lots of water. Not that the water would help anything, but you are not allowed to consume dairy products, if you wish to get the t-shirt. And after all, the t-shirt was what I was after.

Getting the burger revealed its horror. The smell of hot sauce was overwhelming. Had heard from multiple sources, that it was a good idea to start from the fries, so that's exactly what I did. While spicy, they were reasonably easy to eat, except that they made my tongue feel like it was being burnt. But after all, they were the easy part, especially after deciding, that it wasn't actually "temperature-burn", but only "spice-burn", I finished them quite quickly.

And then there was the burger. Still smelling of hot sauce. And I don't mean tabasco hot, or texas pete hot. I mean evil hot. Ignoring the warnings of the smell, I dug into the thing. The first bite was not that bad, until the burn spread. I tried hogging in pieces, but after a few had to take a small break. Or maybe a bit longer. Tried to quench the burn with water, but obviously in vain. The clock kept ticking seconds away; after all there was only 30 minutes to finish it. Fortunately I had mates along, who kept me aware of the time. And one that kept saying that water is a mistake.

After the break, which felt like infinity, and during which the burn only very slightly reduced, I decided to ignore all common sense, and just go with it. After all, I did want the t-shirt. And so I did, I took reasonably sized bits, and ate them as fast as I could. Ignoring any indications, that this is not human food, coming from mouth and stomach. And I kept on going, until there was not a bit left on the plate. And that's when the horror started. Fortunately the waitress was there quite quickly with a glass of milk, which was now allowed, as the beast had been eaten. But unfortunately it did not help much. So I went for the bar to order another one, which did not do much either. And then things took turn for the worse, or at least that's what I thought, and my stomach refused to hold it in any longer.

The next day, however, I realized that it was not a bad thing, but indeed a good thing, and I did not have to cope with the aftermath. And I did get the t-shirt. Huge thanks to my wife for understanding and encouraging. And also the the friend-with-excuses for taking the pictures. The bad quality is not his fault, the restaurant was quite dimly lit. And he did try to consume the burger later on, although despite his valiant efforts, failed. Next try in near future. =)

Now, the same place has this "Ultimate Death Burger", only served during special spicy food theme nights, and one you need to sign a waiver before they serve it...

Finally, after waiting for several weeks, the internets have finally reached the new house I live in. Of course there was an additional 3 day delay due to installation into the wrong telephone socket, to one that actually doesn't exist -- the wire ends somewhere inside the wall. Well, now everything is working!

Since my laptop decided to break down, I've had no good use for lectures at school. This has meant very-little-to-none time for my maemo-hackers.org projects. However, now I got a laptop (which is also neater than my old one) and will hopefully be able to dedicate some time to get some things done that are long overdue. Hopefully this is also good news for my blog. =)

The new laptop makes me love GNU/Linux even more, I just plugged the old HDD in and changed the display driver and everything is going smoothly. No other driver installs, reboots or anything nasty. Since I'm using the same Wi-Fi adapter, I didn't even have to reconfigure my DHCP server.

I've caught a flu. The kind of flu, that drains out your power and makes you feel no-so-good and all. But still the kind that does not stop you from going to work, no fever etc. The worst kind of flu. Well, maybe not the worst, but at least one of the most annoying kinds.

More minor annoyances, seems that MySQL has changed their PASSWORD-function. Got a websites login system disabled for a while due to that. Well, I guess it's "more secure" to do the hashing in php and just use the hash in the query.

After serving me for about 1.5 years, my laptop decided to stop working. First is crashed a couple of times, and then it died dramatically, showing nice colour effects and a fade to white on the display. The effects were indeed nice, but the end result is not; I no longer have laptop. Well, granted, it still has some warranty left, so I'll try to get it fixed, but for the time of being, it is gone.

This happened to be my only computer with scratchbox and working maemo development environment; now I'll need to get my workstation into usable state. I'm concidering of re-installing it with ubuntu, that would make things easier, but I've kind of grown attached to the OS install on it (see my previous post on the subject). Probably I should just back up everything on the new fileserver's 800G RAID and get rid of the buggy Fedora installation.

Two weeks into my summer holiday (my first ever full summer holiday), and everythings going nice. I've been doing mostly nothing, which was pretty much my plan. For the first week, the weather was very nice, but then my father's vacation started too, and, of cource, it started to rain.

I've tried to get my bicycle into better shape, and have spent quite a few euros on new parts and tools for fixing it, props to biltema for cheap (not always so good though) tools and parts.

I've also taken up some asthanga and hatha yoga from a DVD, and it is nice, makes you feel relaxed and revitalized. And it even makes you sweat, you feel like you've done something. I hope that it can eventually make me more flexible -- no results seen yet thought -- as I'm about as flexible as a steel girder.

I've also read -- well not quite finished yet -- the "Men are from mars -- women from venus" by John Gray, and can really recommend the book. Even if your relationship doesn't need it, it is a great book for learning stuff about yourself; stuff you didn't even know you were missing. =)